PB8 pointed that, in practice it was a clustering of factors that would lead people to feel disempowered and unable or unwilling to complain: “… they don’t understand what their human rights are, and they’ve a right to complain… And [that] the right to complain does not impact in any way your asylum claim. And it does not impact and should not impact… on the way people provide services and stuff… some of it is lack of knowledge, some of it is fear. It’s also cultural, because you don’t challenge people in authority… So, there’s different levels of power and disempowerment and sense of autonomy” (PB8). Issues around access, engagement and outreach for the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman (NIPSO) A number of participants suggested that a lack of knowledge about NIPSO and its low profile among asylum seekers refugees was a barrier, and that greater efforts should be made to publicise the institution. CSO7 said: “I suppose in the first instance it’s just knowing… having the knowledge of who to go, where to go... So it’s that… it’s having that knowledge, knowing what the ombudsman’s role is in society, what their powers are, how to contact them” (CSO7). CSO8 commented that even professionals might have limited knowledge of the ombudsman: “I’d never really, until maybe honestly, like, a couple of years ago, known the ombudsman was there for public services... But if a professional who’s worked in this area for a good few years maybe doesn’t know that they’re there, how much less are families going to?” (CSO8). CSO6 said there was a need for more efforts to reach out to groups supporting asylum seekers and refugees to explain the potential benefits of complaining: “… if I was here just working on my own, basically, I doubt if I’d know much about them [NIPSO] because they don’t reach out to groups very much like ours. I think they need to make their profile higher, they need to be making it more public what they do and how they can help people like ourselves or how they can be beneficial to people like ourselves” (CSO6). CSO6 noted that the following kinds of outreach and engagement would be helpful : “… coming out and talking to people, setting up workshop as to what they can do, what they offer, how they can help us. Even more publicity, because social media, you don’t see them mentioned on social media. And that obviously is for everybody younger, that’s the main source of information now” (CSO6). One participant noted that the request to participate in the present project was the first time they had heard of NIPSO: “I don’t know much about the ombudsman, to be honest. I never heard about it until I got that letter, the email. So I think they should go into the community first of all and educate the people about what they do” (CSO11).
CSO11 discussed the challenge for NIPSO of reaching asylum seekers and refugees themselves and that they could not necessarily rely on messages filtering through from civil society groups: “… that workshop was good, was amazing. But it still, kind of like, marginalises a lot of people. Because the people that were invited were group leaders, workers like myself. And I will tell you that 95 per cent of us are not going to share what we experienced or what we discussed with the groups that we represent. Ninety-five per cent will not do it” (CSO11). CSO11 suggested that to be effective, outreach needed to be at a very local level, targeting specific communities, and involving NIPSO attending existing events organised by communities: “I think that the ombudsman should identify local organisations within this community, Somali community, Nigerian community, black [community]… In the language that people best understand rather than bringing an interpreter into a room clustered with five/six groups and then use the five/six interpreters. It won’t work… Most people are intimidated by these big names. Or doesn’t know what ombudsman means. You write a letter to them and say, come to us. They won’t come. They won’t, you know. So it’s going to just local groups, local places, where you have an event coming up or can you organise a small group so we can talk to them, so people are aware” (CSO11). PB8 agreed that what was needed was an approach which started at the “grass roots” : “… they’re looking down. I think they need to go to the grass roots and find out what it is, to understand with these groups and find out what it is people really need to know” (PB8). CSO8 commented that despite making efforts to enhance its visibility and profile there was still a sense that NIPSO was “up there” and out of reach of asylum seekers and refugees who may have suffered injustice: “… they’re becoming more well-known but still not well enough known. So, I think… and they know it themselves that their public face needs to be a lot more. Because to me, even the very word ombudsman always sounds like it’s something away up there. And how does somebody on the ground get to somebody away up there?” (CSO8). CSO3 said that if they needed help, people would be much more likely to seek help from community organisations than NIPSO and that any expectation that this might change would be “failing big time” : “So if they want to base the thing on saying, ‘no, asylum seekers are not complaining’, they’re failing big time, because you don’t expect someone who’s struggling with his daily life to go and contact the Ombudsman because something happened to him or his child is not given a school place, you know? He would rather contact community services and try to see how they can help, not the Ombudsman” (CSO3). A practical barrier to complaining was the fact that, along with other statutory agencies, there was generally a requirement for local complaints procedures to be exhausted: “… they have so many parameters… some of them say to people, you have to have gone through all the complaint mechanisms of the relevant body before you come to us and you have to have whatever. And people just have limited bandwidth and energy” (CSO5).
46 | Access to Public Services and Access to Justice for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Northern Ireland
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